Alphabet, Amazon, and Meta Will Spend Over $500 Billion on AI in 2026. Nvidia Collects a Huge Share.

Company updates this year put fresh numbers on the AI (artificial intelligence) build-out, and they are enormous. Alphabet raised its 2026 capital spending forecast to a range of $195 billion to $205 billion, up from $180 billion to $190 billion. Amazon has said it expects to invest about $200 billion this year. And Meta Platforms plans $125 billion to $145 billion, a range it lifted by $10 billion in April.

Add it up, and just three companies intend to spend more than half a trillion dollars in a single year, most of it on AI infrastructure. And that tally leaves out Microsoft, which has pointed to about $190 billion of its own.

No company collects more of that spending than Nvidia (NASDAQ: NVDA), the dominant supplier of the graphics processing units (GPUs) those data centers are built around. Yet Nvidia stock fell on Thursday alongside other big tech stocks, and it now sits about 12% below its 52-week high.

Customers committing record sums while the supplier's stock drifts lower? That's a disconnect worth examining, because one side of it is probably wrong.

Image source: Nvidia.

Where those budgets end up

The budgets are not all chips, but a large share of the money goes where Nvidia lives. Alphabet, for instance, said on its earnings call that about 60% of its technical infrastructure investment in the second quarter went to servers, with the rest going to data centers and networking equipment. The company also raised $49.6 billion in a June stock offering, with scaling AI infrastructure among the stated uses.

The flow shows up directly in Nvidia's results. In its first quarter of fiscal 2027 (the period ended April 26, 2026), revenue rose 85% year over year to a record $81.6 billion. Data center revenue climbed 92% to $75.2 billion, and total revenue rose 20% from the prior quarter as well. And the company guided for about $91 billion in revenue in its fiscal second quarter, all while holding its gross margin near 75%.

"The buildout of AI factories -- the largest infrastructure expansion in human history -- is accelerating at extraordinary speed," said CEO Jensen Huang in the company's fiscal first-quarter earnings release.

In other words, the customers' budgets and the supplier's income statement are telling the same story, and Alphabet's raise this past week extended it into the second half of 2026.

So why did the stock slip?

One possible explanation is that the market punished the spenders on Thursday. Alphabet's shares fell after its capital spending raise, and the sell-off spread across the megacaps, Nvidia included. When investors start doubting whether half a trillion dollars of AI spending will earn its keep, they also start discounting the revenue that spending creates -- and a large share of it lands on Nvidia's income statement.

That's the risk to hold in mind. Nvidia's growth is a direct function of a handful of customers' willingness to keep writing bigger checks. Budgets that accelerate for three years can also flatten, and the semiconductor industry has never escaped its cycles for long. A capital budget is a plan, not a contract, and plans built during a boom can get rewritten quickly.

The same customers are also working to need Nvidia a little less. Meta said on its first-quarter earnings call that it is rolling out more than a gigawatt of its own custom silicon, developed with Broadcom, alongside chips from Advanced Micro Devices -- complementing, for now, the new Nvidia systems it keeps installing.

With all of that said, the valuation asks less than investors might assume. Nvidia trades at about 32 times trailing earnings -- a multiple many slower-growing consumer companies carry -- for a business that just grew 85%. The market, in effect, is already pricing in a meaningful slowdown. Against expected earnings for the next 12 months, the multiple drops to about 21.

So does Thursday's sell-off make Nvidia the way to own the build-out? I think it remains the most direct claim on those budgets, and at this valuation I'd keep owning it. But I'd size the position for what it is: a stock whose earnings depend on a handful of customers' capital budgets -- and capital budgets get revisited every year.

Daniel Sparks and his clients do not have positions in any of the stocks mentioned. The Motley Fool has positions in and recommends Advanced Micro Devices, Alphabet, Amazon, Broadcom, Meta Platforms, Microsoft, and Nvidia. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.